Letters to Tommy
by BlytheHasFreckles
Summary: Marie has traveled to a place where contact with family and friends is a near impossibility and decides it would keep the homesickness at bay if she writes letters home to her best friend, Thomas. But will recalling memories from their childhood reveal stronger feelings for him she didn't know existed? Based on true stories.


_**Hey everyone! It's Blythe! I haven't been around much these days! Can you tell?**_

_**Anyway, this story is a late Valentine's Day present for a certain someone who means the world to me. He knows who he is. Happy (late) Valentine's Day, honey. **_

_**Thomas Fletcher and Marie Flynn belong to Sam-Ely-Ember and Angelus19 of DeviantArt. Phineas and Ferb belong to Disney. **_

_**Reviews are super appreciated, but please be civil.**_

_**-Blythe**_

* * *

**Dear Tommy,**

**I know you can't read this since I have no way to send this to you, but I thought that – for my own sake – writing to you might keep me from going mad. It's been three months already! Can you believe that? I know I can't. My body's already adjusted to living here, but my mind still misses home.**

**It's been a while since we've spoken. How are you? What have you been up to recently? I think about you all the time, especially when I settle down to sleep at night. That's when the homesickness hits me the most. Sometimes I get so homesick I even find myself dreaming about home. About all the things we used to do when we were kids and when we used to build things in my backyard.**

**And, you know, how I used to always find a way to blow it up. Haha! I'll bet you don't miss that!**

**I start thinking about distant memories in the past. Like when we met when we were really, really little. I mean, we technically knew each other since birth, but we didn't really 'meet' until we were toddlers. Do you remember that, Tommy? I do.**

* * *

Three year-old Marie had decided she was an artist. She sat in the playground sandbox only a few steps from the blacktop where kids usually played lazy games of foursquare and hopscotch in the middle of autumn and made her finest sand creations just when the color of the leaves began to show signs of change. Today was especially a fine day to make sandbox masterpieces since it had rained earlier and the sand was nice and firm. This, as anyone could've guessed, was the day when she'd make her best sand creation of all – her first sand man.

She got to work right away, gathering the solid grains of sand from where rain had collected in the corner and used her hands as a shovel, scooping the sides of the sandbox and piling the bits of chunky and hydrated sand toward the center. From there, she dove her fists into the pile and began right away on her finest work.

She started with the base of the sand man, creating a raised hill and smoothing it out like one would a snowman from a fresh coat of snow. From there, she rolled the midsection from the finer grains in the center of the box and meshed it with the base she had created and then smoothed the two appendages together. The head came last, pounded like a snowball from her palms into as perfect a sphere as she could make it. Then she stuffed it onto the body she'd artistically molded, added two twigs she'd found for his arms, and took a few steps back to look at her masterpiece.

Huh. Something was missing. Ah, that's right! The finishing touches!

Quickly, she climbed out of the sandbox and scavenged the playground for materials she needed, making a short grocery list of items in her head: a handful of pebbles for the eyes and mouth, a leaf, and something she could use as a hat.

Right away she was able to use the playground's gravel as the perfect substitution for eyes and a small leaf that had drifted from a nearby tree to use for a nose. She gathered them in her hands and decorated the face of the sand man, pressing the pieces into her creation delicately, as not to disturb the texture. Then, she formed a gentle smile on the man with the tiny rocks and fit the nose directly in the center of the face, planting the stem as carefully as she could. She stepped back again and gazed at her craftsmanship.

Nope. Something was still missing. A hat!

Quickly, Marie hobbled out of the sandbox and scanned the playground again for the answer to her inquiries, searching under the small benches and basketball hoops for something, anything she could give her newborn sandman as cover from the bitter autumn weather. Surely there was something out there.

And suddenly, there was! Just below the monkey bars was a small knitted navy blue hat with no one to claim as its owner. She picked it up and smoothed her fingers gently over the wooly texture. The hat was small, but stretchy enough so that she herself could wear it, despite being born with a genetically wide head much like her mother's. It may not have been her favorite color, but it was perfect. And when she fit it over the sandman's head, it looked even better than she'd expected.

As she stepped back to look at her creation for the final time, she was joined by several other kids, many of them older than her. They uttered compliments as they gawked at the finished presentation.

"Wow, that looks so good!"

"Good job, Marie!"

"How did you do that?"

"Cool!"

"I've never seen somebody do that with sand before!"

Her cheeks flushed red. Never had she been complimented on something she'd created before! And especially not by the bigger kids! Perhaps she'd been made to make sandmen like this. Maybe she was meant to be an artist. Maybe-

"Wait a minute!" interjected a voice among the flurry of compliments, "that's my hat!"

The crowd of playground kids cleared as a little boy nudged his way through the gathering. He was about as tall as Marie but twice as grumpy looking as her, looking deceptively fatter with his winter coat puffing at the sleeves as he crossed his arms over his chest. She'd seen this boy before. Perhaps their families had introduced them at one point? Nevertheless, he looked unhappy with what he was seeing.

"You stole my hat!" the little boy said, "Give it back."

"I didn't steal it," she argued, "I found it!"

"Where?"

"Under there!" she said firmly, pointing to the monkey bars across the blacktop.

The boy didn't seem satisfied at all by this, "I dropped my hat when I was over there."

"Well I'm using it now. Finder's keepers."

Disgruntled by the immortal rule of 'finder's keepers', the boy looked at the sandman and grunted.

"A sandman?"

"Mhm!" replied Marie, puffed up with pride over her artwork, "Made it all by myself."

"I can see that," said the boy, "…it's ugly."

Marie stiffened by the sudden criticism, feeling the bitterness of having just being insulted about her work, "what do you mean he's _ugly?_ He's not _ugly_!"

"The face is all wrong. Pebbles for eyes? He wouldn't be able to see out of those. And how do you expect him to hear anything without ears?"

"I don't need to put ears on him for him to hear!"

"Yes, you do."

"No, I don't!"

"Yes."

"No!"

The boy put his hand over the sandman's head and got a grip on the knitted hat, poised to tear it off, "if you're not going to listen to me, I'm going to take my hat back!"

Marie sprung forward to stop him, "Wait, don't-!"

But before she could stop it from happening, the boy ripped off the hat and the head of the sandman toppled off, causing the rest of it to crumble slightly from the force. The young artist stared down at the sandman's head, dismayed, and felt the corners of her eyes sting as tears began to flourish.

"That's what you get when you take people's hats," said the boy.

Marie said nothing. First the criticism and now this? She began to weep, "That…that was mean! I-I worked hard on that."

Immediately, the boy's expression changed. A face that once reaped an expression of distaste now seemed sorry - apologetic, even. He watched her quietly, not quite sure what to do with what was happening now. Did he go too far? Maybe accidentally wrecking her sandman was not wise.

"Hey…" he said gently, "I didn't mean to…I mean, I didn't…"

She put her head into her hands and continued to weep, turning away from him.

"Wait, don't cry," said the boy, moving closer to her, "I said I didn't mean to."

That hardly mattered now, though. The more he spoke the more Marie seemed to cry harder. He looked down at the hat curled inside his fists, then back at her with pity. Carefully, he shuffled forward until he was right next to her and held his hand out.

"…Here."

Marie looked up from her hands, sniffling. The boy stared back at her, his arm extended. In his hands was the hat.

"Take it. I have a bunch at home anyway."

Marie took the hat in her hands, saying nothing to the boy.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled.

Marie looked from the hat back to him, slowly smiling amid the tears, "I'm Marie." She sniffled, "what's your name?"

"Tommy." He replied. He looked down at the mess below their feet and blushed softly, "so…do you need help making another?"

* * *

**I knew we were going to be friends forever after that. And we stayed that way. Can you believe you actually let me call you Tommy back then? Gosh, I can hardly believe I remember something so far back! Makes me wish I was home even more.**

**I miss you, Tommy.**


End file.
